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There is a fine line between success and failure in business and it is a sad fact that a majority of new ventures close their doors before the end of their third year of trading. Fortunately, there are tried and tested ways to improve your odds.
One is to make sure founders (note, that means more than one person) have business expertise before launching out on their own. Another is for founders to have cut their teeth managing other people's projects before making a hash of their own.
However, when it comes to entrepreneurs, rules are there to be broken. And it just so happens that I've been following two start-ups since 2008 run by entrepreneurs with none of those characteristics. Yet they have succeeded, where others have failed, and handsomely so.
Mark Fletcher, 26, co-founder of Pitchero.com, and Shamus Husheer, 34, co-founder of Cambridge Temperature Concepts, helped set up their ventures straight from university.
Leeds-based Pitchero has built a website platform for amateur and semi-professional sports clubs that can be tailored to their needs, from self-publishing match reports and player stats to managing transactions such as the club shop and collecting membership fees.
Pitchero picked up 60 clubs for its soft launch back in 2008 and now has 12,000, with a core of 4,000 that are using its websites every day. The websites created by the five-man company attract more than 1m unique users each month, all...